Volvo has blind artist paint its new car as promotional event, as well as way to discourage prejudice against blind people

From The New York Times:

In September, shortly before Esref Armagan (pictured), a Turkish artist, was escorted into Volvo’s design studio in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he would be the first person from outside the company invited to encounter the 2011 Volvo S60, he said, “I promise not to look.”

Then Mr. Armagan smiled — he is, after all, blind.

The moment is captured in a new promotional video — posted on Volvo’s Facebook page and on YouTube — documenting how the automaker commissioned a painting of the S60 by Mr. Armagan, who is filmed running his hands along the vehicle’s exterior before rendering sketches, and, finally, the painting.

Filmed in a documentary style, the five-minute video — done by the Euro RSCG 4D advertising agency in Amsterdam and the Great Guns production company in London — is a novel approach for a teaser campaign.

Automakers previewing new or overhauled models often release photographs of the cars obscured by shadows or draped in cloth. Here Volvo likewise offers tantalizing close-up glimpses of the vehicle as the artist touches it, but the video turns out to reveal less about the S60 than about Mr. Armagan.

“I didn’t start out to be an artist, I just wanted to learn about the world around me that I was living in,” Mr. Armagan says in Turkish in the subtitled video. “Feeling around with my fingers has completely erased my blindness. It’s as if I see like anyone else.”

The avuncular Mr. Armagan, who is 56 and wears Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, was born blind and impoverished, according to a biography on his Web site. The self-taught artist’s work has been exhibited in Turkey, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.

Like other blind artists, he bears down firmly when sketching, keeping track of indentations. While drawing is growing more common among the blind, Mr. Armagan’s mastery of both scale and perspective has aroused the interest of scientists.

“Esref is the blind person who has the largest set of perspective drawing skills to come to light,” said John M. Kennedy, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, who has done research over three decades on how the blind draw.

Some blind artists have drawn from two-point perspective, capturing two surfaces of an object, which in the case of a box means being able to draw it at eye level while facing a corner. But Dr. Kennedy said Mr. Armagan was unusual in his ability to draw from a three-point perspective, capturing that same corner of a box, but from above or below.

In the video, Mr. Armagan draws the S60 from a perspective above and slightly to the side, depicting the grille and hood as well as its right side and roof. Then he paints — using his fingers, and blow-drying the canvas between colors to avoid smears — a blue sky with wisps of clouds and trees receding in the distance. While by no means photorealistic, the car is recognizably a Volvo, with the brand’s telltale logo on its grille.

Volvo is auctioning Mr. Armagan’s painting on eBay, with proceeds to go to the World Blind Union, an international nonprofit group based in Toronto that works to eliminate prejudice toward the blind. The auction is scheduled to conclude next Thursday.

“He’s showing us what is possible, and it’s indeed stuff that we thought for centuries was impossible,” Dr. Kennedy said.

In a Harvard experiment featured in a Discovery Channel segment, Mr. Armagan sketched while having his brain monitored by an M.R.I. scanner, and researchers marveled that on the monitor his visual cortex lighted up, much as it does with those who have sight.

As for the artist’s depiction being the default preview of the S60, which will be publicly unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in March, that plan proved short-lived. Just days after Volvo uploaded the video, spy photos of the new S60 began appearing on auto blogs in Europe, and some of the more than 8,000 fans on Volvo’s official Facebook page posted photos there, too. Volvo consequently released a pair of official photos on Facebook on Nov. 10.

But Lukas Dohle, director of live communication and social media at Volvo, said in a telephone interview from Sweden that the video — which has been viewed more than 260,000 times on Facebook, YouTube and other Web sites, Volvo says — is successful irrespective of the leaks.

Judging from comments posted online, “it’s actually a lot of people who are not typical car enthusiasts or petrol heads who are inspired by this film and this artist,” Mr. Dohle said.

For his part, Mr. Armagan seemed inspired by the Volvo as well, joking at one point in the video, “Are they going to let me drive it, too?”